Sobre la proximidad, la democracia y el Guernica

Michael Kimmelman publica hoy en el NYT un ensayo interesante acerca de la democracia y el arte, el fundamentalismo y el simbolismo.

A Symbol of Freedom and a Target for Terrorists

MADRID — Last Saturday, on what Parisians call White Night, when thousands of people cavort in the streets until dawn, a bunch of intruders broke into the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and punched a hole in a Monet. Then from the obscure and formerly bucolic university town of Lund, in southern Sweden, came news that a group of hooded vandals with crowbars and axes stormed into an art gallery and, to the accompaniment of death-metal music, destroyed several sexually explicit photographs by Andres Serrano.

While the Parisian hooligans were undone partly because they were caught on the museum’s security cameras, the Swedish gang went them one better. They proudly advertised their crime on YouTube.

So the other day I stopped into the Reina Sofía here to check on Picasso’s “Guernica.” The threat of violence is nothing new in Spain, where Muslim terrorists blew up commuter trains a few years ago, killing many, and where the threat of killings by Basque extremists (there was a bomb attack in Bilbao on Tuesday, a truce with the government having broken down in June) has again become part of the daily background noise of life.

Only a simple stanchion, and a discreet alarm, as I discovered when leaning too close, separates the public from Picasso’s famous mural about a midcentury act of terror: the German bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica in 1936. The picture presides over a big gallery of related Picassos, each a target, I suppose, if you adopt the mindset that terrorists, and those who would exploit terrorism, like to foster.

Twenty-six years ago, when the painting arrived in Madrid from New York, it was installed in a huge bulletproof glass cage at an annex of the Prado, flanked by soldiers guarding what had become an international symbol of antifascism. Picasso had wanted it to go to Spain only when Generalissimo Francisco Franco was gone. To anyone who remembered it at the Museum of Modern Art, the sight at the Prado was sad and shocking. The picture looked forlorn, suffocated. It was almost impossible to see.

It had already been vandalized at the Museum of Modern Art when a small-time artist named Tony Shafrazi sprayed the words “Kill Lies All” on it in 1974. In the creepy, amnesiac way that celebrity and money operate in America and in the art world, Mr. Shafrazi went on to become a rich and powerful art dealer.

The painting moved some years ago from the Prado to the Reina Sofía and was finally let out of its glass prison. I’ve never loved “Guernica,” to tell the truth. Its lofty ambition obscures the detriments of its telegraphed emotions and inflated billboard-size Cubism, but time only adds to its patina of glory for the crowds that come to commune with it and who can now get almost, but not quite, close enough to touch the picture.

Proximity is the cost, and virtue, of a civil and democratic society. We run the risk that some lunatic or self-promoter will violate the public trust of an open space because we value that space as a democratic ideal. Part of what’s beautiful about an art museum, aside from what’s on view, is that it implies trust — it lets us stand next to objects that supposedly represent civilization at its best and, in so doing, flatters us for respecting our common welfare.

Complaints that museums are snobbish palaces and that works of art in them are treated like holy relics may not be all wrong, but they miss the point that people go to museums partly to enjoy this compact with what, as a society, we decide has enduring value — with art whose fragility and vulnerability to attack make our encounters with it that much more special.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/arts/design/13vand.html?th&emc=th

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